paradox

paradox, apparently self-contradictory statement, the underlying meaning of which is revealed only by careful scrutiny. The purpose of a paradox is to arrest attention and provoke fresh thought. The statement “Less is more” is an example. Francis Bacon’s saying, “The most corrected copies are commonly the least correct,” is an earlier literary example. In George Orwell’s anti-utopian satire Animal Farm (1945), the first commandment of the animals’ commune is revised into a witty paradox: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Paradox has a function in poetry, however, that goes beyond mere wit or attention-getting. Modern critics view it as a device, integral to poetic language, encompassing the tensions of error and truth simultaneously, not necessarily by startling juxtapositions but by subtle and continuous qualifications of the ordinary meaning of words.

When a paradox is compressed into two words as in “loud silence,” “lonely crowd,” or “living death,” it is called an oxymoron.